


Codex of the Fenbenders

by Altonym



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Fenbending, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-16
Updated: 2014-05-16
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:06:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1623473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Altonym/pseuds/Altonym
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A brief overview of a bending population on the northern coast of the Earth Kingdom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Codex of the Fenbenders

Though waterbenders are primarily known to populate the extreme polar regions of the earth, where they are surrounded by the various forms of their element, this is not always so. Perhaps the most well-known non-polar waterbenders are the swampbenders, who are adept at manipulating the normally stagnant waters of their home environment to outmanouevre invaders, and have thus held out against outsiders for millenia.

Swampbending is unique because it displays on the largest scale the potential of waterbenders to manipulate life - not merely the taboo art of bloodbending, but a wider variety of applications which involve the movement of water within plants, or the ripping of liquid from them. These applications are almost always defensive or martial. However, a little-known discipline of the Earth Kingdom's northern coast takes a different approach, manipulating the water within plants not to manipulate or to exploit, but to enhance and restore.

The region north of the Anvil Mountains has, for thousands of years, been inhabited by a group who have remained self-sufficient and relatively independent from the rest of the Earth Kingdom. They are the fenbenders, a waterbending population with a unique marriage of plantwater manipulation and the healing arts. Their doctrine is simple - plants use liquids as a carrier of nutrients from the ground; we can help the process along in balance, and thus produce abundant harvests while avoiding exhaustion of the soil.

Their environment is somewhat unique; flat and almost below sea-level, over hundreds of miles it slowly elevates until rising suddenly into the lower reaches of the Anvils. The coast is an endless, muddy series of natural salt marshes, which the fenbenders (in tandem with a minority population of earthbenders) have shaped into wide salt-producing pits, the main export of the region and the source of its wealth. The rest of the farmland is fertile but shallow, and given to quick exhaustion. For millenia, nomadic earthbenders treated this place as a temporary stop, never good for more than one harvest.  
  
Both the salt purification process and agriculture are reliant on waterbending, and a farmer elite has grown up here, fenbender dynasties each with their own private growth techniques. The salt purification process is much simpler, done on a much larger scale, and as a result (despite the increased value of salt) there is much less prestige attached to salt production. Broadly speaking, a farming family will own a strip of coastal farmland and a strip of salt marsh coast, and will employ poorer families to work the marshes while they reserve the important work of soil management for their own.

It is unclear when the fenbenders settled this particular area - their own folk history tells of a schism in the northern water tribe which forced the rejects out and to the south, though the northern water tribe records no such thing. What is important is the unique discipline that evolved here - using waterbending to encourage consistent growth, to produce vast canal systems not unlike the paddies of the Earth Kingdom's southern breadbaskets. The capital city of this region, Earthport, has as many tiny criss-crossing canals as it does streets, with a thousand bridges spanning them. The infuence of the northern water tribe capital is as clear as a full moon.

What fenbenders do with groundwater is in many ways similar to the healing arts of the northern waterbenders, and the fenbenders have not neglected this aspect of their power. One shallow valley connects fenbender territory with the south, and here a large healing complex beneath a waterfall serves any who can make the journey.

The fenbenders do not practice an aggressive form of waterbending, and in fact most fenbenders never learn waterbending as a form of combat. Instead, during invasions the fenbenders have historically used their expertise over their environment as a defence. They were one of the five kingdoms which resisted the expansion of Chin the Conquerer, collapsing their marshes into the sea and flooding the valleys which connected them to the rest of the continent. Like Kyoshi, they made an island, albeit one slightly more metaphorical.   
  
During the Imperial Era of the Fire Nation, the fenbenders were conquered early, by navy, and their expertise directed towards the development of the Fire Nation colonies. After the end of the colonial era, many stayed to the southwest because their colonies were unsustainable without extensive soil treatment. These fenbenders had been ripped from their home, and had then been made the beating heart of their prison. They now form a wealthy peasant farmer class not unlike the one they formed at home.

One Avatar is known to have been sourced from the fenbenders; Avatar Gao, the Rejuvenator, also known as the Pariah. His vocation followed a many-sided and horrific war between the many kingdoms that predated the formal Earth Kingdom, leaving in its wake a continent-wide and decades-long famine, as well as a large dust bowl produced through excessive farming. The Avatar Cycle works the way it is meant to, and it is no coincidence that a fenbending avatar arrived when he did.

Gao formed and gave his name to a major river of the Earth Kingdom, the work of thirty years of careful terraforming and excavation, a work of balance and healing. It ran directly through the dust bowl. When this river failed to immediately rejuvenate the area, Gao was declared an outcast and a failure, and spent the rest of his days as a cloaked wanderer and healer. But he had sacrificed the now for the future, and in time the river brought life and growth back for good. Gao is venerated by the White Lotus society, which sustained him during his long exile, and thus they call him Gao Pai Sho, sometimes also Gao Who Played the Longest Game.

In many ways, Gao represented the fenbender philosophy - one that recognises balance and the passage of time as more important than temporary gains. The fenbenders eschew one extraordinary harvest in favour of a thousand satisfactory harvests, eschew their own stuffed belly for a hundred fed grandchildren, recognising that to take all one can is not always to act with wisdom. The soil is complex, easily disturbed, and requires care and attention through all time.

The fenbenders are linked to the other waterbenders in their complete harmony with their surrounding environment - unlike the Earthbenders who persist despite their environment, the Airbenders who escape the limitations of their environment, and the Firebenders who impose themselves on their environment, a waterbender forms a part of their environment, becomes one with it and changed by it. Whether this is survival in a polar extreme, mastery of the swamp, or expert stewardship of a fragile, unusual environment, waterbenders - fenbenders - remain at home always.


End file.
